Get others involved
It’s up to you to put a strategy in motion and explain to your board how it will solve your company’s problems. But that doesn’t mean you can’t seek out help in putting the plan together.
As Reynolds began looking at how to solve Graybar’s problems, he quickly got his management team involved in the process.
“I can’t lock myself in my office and work real effectively,” Reynolds says. “I need to be out listening to people and talking to people and finding out what’s going on in the world. What’s going on in our industry? What’s going on with our competition? You try to pull all that together and figure out where the company needs to go to be better than what the others are doing.”
One of the first steps to any good strategy is research. A lot of research.
“You have to get other people involved in leading the effort,” Reynolds says, before thinking back to the first time he led the development of a business strategy.
“Everybody looked to me and said, ‘You’re the leader. You need to put this strategy together,’” Reynolds says. “You put the strategy together and then you’re all done and things start getting better and people say, ‘Well, we don’t have a strategy.’ I sat there and I said, ‘What do you mean we don’t have a strategy?’ Then you have to go back and rework it and say, ‘OK, what did I miss here?’
“What I learned is that for that strategy to be effective, it can’t be your strategy; it has to be everybody’s strategy. It has to be management’s strategy. Then it can’t be you taking that strategy out alone. It has to be management taking the strategy out with you. Everybody needs to have ownership of it. Everybody needs to buy in to it. Everybody has to communicate it as a team strategy, not as a Bob Reynolds’ strategy.”
Reynolds says he doesn’t follow a step-by-step process in developing a strategy. It’s simply a product of conversations he has with his management team.
“You’re waiting for that moment when it clicks and you say, ‘Aha, I got it. Let’s put it down. Let’s see if this rolls,’” Reynolds says. “You can’t sit there and try to force it.”
Talk to your people as you’re building the strategy. Don’t sit in your office and draw it up and then bring them the finished product.
“You’re getting buy-in as you go along,” Reynolds says. “You’re building it not just with your ideas. You’re building it with the ideas of others.”
One of the key conflicts at Graybar was figuring out how to improve the company’s operating systems without overwhelming a balance sheet that was already in bad shape.
“How are we going to improve the company while we’re growing the company?” Reynolds says. “How are we going to keep the balance sheet in good shape as we continue to do that?”
Reynolds led the meetings that were held to discuss these important issues. But he was never the first one to offer his opinion.
“When you contribute early, it shuts down everybody else,” Reynolds says. “As the leader, you want to be the last one to contribute. You want to be more a listener than a speaker. You can lead the meeting, but let everybody else provide their opinion. Once you provide your opinion, it shuts everything else down. They feel your mind is made up and you’re going forward. In essence, that’s not what you’re saying. You’re just trying to contribute like everybody else.”
